The mother of a girl who was horrifically wounded in a school shooting in Canada in February is suing OpenAI for not warning police about the killer, Jesse Van Rootselaar, according to reports.
Some eight months before the shooting in British Columbia, which killed eight people including the perpetrator and injured 25 others, OpenAI employees had already been aware of Van Rootselaar’s alarming conversations with ChatGPT after they were flagged by an automated review system, a story broken by the Wall Street Journal in the wake of the massacre. Around a dozen staffers debated notifying authorities about Rootselaar’s disturbing conversations, which included “scenarios involving gun violence,” but leadership ultimately decided not to.
Now, a lawsuit filed by Mia Edmonds, the mother of a 12-year-old named Maya Gebala who survived the shooting but remains in critical condition, argues that OpenAI had “specific knowledge of the shooter utilizing ChatGPT to plan a mass casualty event like the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting,” per the Associated Press, and demands punitive damages from the company.
Maya was shot three times at close range while she was trying to lock a door to keep out the shooter, including in the head and the neck, according to the suit. She remains hospitalized with a catastrophic brain injury and is paralyzed on the right side of her body. Her sister Dahlia was also at the school during the shooting and while she wasn’t physically injured, she’s now suffering PTSD, anxiety, and depression, the suit said.
In the original WSJ reporting, OpenAI said that it banned Van Rootselaar’s account but admitted that at the time it didn’t consider her activity a credible and imminent risk of serious physical harm to others. Later, the company revealed that Van Rootselaar had made a second account to subvert the ban, claiming it only discovered the alt after the shooter’s name was released publicly.
The lawsuit alleges the “shooter used their second account to continue planning scenarios involving gun violence, including a mass casualty event like the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, with ChatGPT, and to receive mental health counseling and pseudo-therapy from ChatGPT.”
It also accuses OpenAI of rushing ChatGPT to a global market without conducting proper safety studies and implementing strong safeguards, echoing claims made by many of the company’s critics. OpenAI, more so than other AI leaders, has been under the microscope for ongoing reports of so-called AI psychosis, the term some experts are using to describe delusional episodes caused by a chatbot’s sycophantic responses, which comes as millions of users treat chatbots as their personal confidante or therapist. Specific versions of ChatGPT have been singled out as being especially obsequious, and extreme cases have led to breaks with reality and explosions of violence. Some users, including teenagers, have taken their own lives after extensively discussing their thoughts of suicide with ChatGPT, and others have committed murder. The February shooting in British Columbia has only heightened these questions about what OpenAI is doing to ensure its platform is safe.
“The purpose of this lawsuit is to learn the whole truth about how and why the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting happened, to impose accountability, to seek redress for harms and losses, and to help prevent another mass-shooting atrocity in Canada,” read a statement from the law firm representing Edmonds.
After the shooting OpenAI vowed to make its AI safer, including measures to prevent users from circumventing bans on the platform. Last week, CEO Sam Altman met virtually with Canada’s AI Minister Evan Solomon to discuss why the company had failed to alert authorities, after which Solomon said he was ordering a government safety review of OpenAI’s technology. The next day, Altman met with BC premier David Eby, promising to make an apology to the victims of the shooting. No apology has yet appeared publicly.
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